Mauritius to Richard's Bay, South Africa - Day 6
Harmonie
Don and Anne Myers
Sun 27 May 2012 08:34
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27:04.366S 41:33.010E
May 27, 2012
Another 200 mile day.
We continued to zoom yesterday afternoon and on through the
night in winds that strengthened to 35 knots at times. It made for
interesting boat motion - quite a bit of rolling since the wind was mostly
behind us, with the occasional hard lurch to starboard when a
particularly large wave gave us a push. The wind chose to build just as we
were having dinner (why is this always the case?) making the dinner
conversation rather one-dimensional. "Where is this coming from?" we
kept asking each other (not that we really expected an answer...it
just made us feel better to ask). We were expecting higher
winds, but not quite that high. Bruce did promise the wind would start to
"ease" when we reached 43E longitude, and it did. But not until after John
was subjected to at least 90 minutes of the worst of the wind punctuated by an
unpleasant rain shower driven into the cockpit in the middle of his
dead-of-night watch. At that point, he might have been re-thinking his
decision to join us on this passage. However, the wind did moderate and
John was a new man after a shower this morning. As a matter of fact, the
captain and crew are all quite clean and shiny this morning, which makes up for
the grunge look we were going for yesterday.
We are thrilled with our progress, having sailed 400 miles in
two days. We still have at least 1 knot of current with us, and are hoping
it stays that way for at least another day. At the moment, the winds are
down around 13-18 knots from the east, and are expected to stay that way until
they die completely sometime on Tuesday. Until then, we'll do
our best to sail at a good pace, which should put us at the start of our
Agulhas current crossing sometime late Tuesday night.
We've passed the two-thirds mark in record time, logging the
1,000th mile just a few minutes ago. A short 500 more miles to go and
Bob's your uncle, we'll be there.
Anne
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